Aye, when you realize that the sacred and divine institution is being
caricatured and defamed by clandestine marriages and escapades all
over the land, does there not seem a call for such discussion? Hardly
a morning or evening paper comes into your possession without
reporting them, and there are fifty of these occurrences where one is
reported, because it is the interest of all parties to hush them up.
The victims are, all hours of the night, climbing down ladders or
crossing over from State to State, that they may reach laws of greater
laxity, holding reception six months after marriage to let the public
know for the first time that a half year before they were united in
wedlock. Ministers of religion, and justices of the peace, and mayors
of cities, willingly joining in marriage runaways from other States
and neighborhoods; the coach-box and the back seat of the princely
landau in flirtation; telegrams flashing across the country for the
arrest of absconded school misses, who started off with arm full of
books, and taking rail trains to meet their affianced--in the
snow-drifts of the great storm that has recently passed over the
country some of them, I read, have perished--thousands of people in a
marriage whose banns have never been published; precipitated
conjugality; bigamy triumphant; marriage a joke; society blotched all
over with a putrefaction on this subject which no one but the Almighty
God can arrest.
We admit that clandestinity and escapade are sometimes authorized and
made right by parental tyranny or domestic serfdom. There have been
exceptional cases where parents have had a monomania in regard to
their sons and daughters, demanding their celibacy or forbidding
relations every way right. Through absurd family ambition parents have
sometimes demanded qualifications and equipment of fortune
unreasonable to expect or simply impossible. Children are not expected
to marry to please their parents, but to please themselves. Given good
morals, means of a livelihood, appropriate age and quality of social
position, and no parent has a right to prohibit a union that seems
deliberate and a matter of the heart. Rev. Philip Henry, eminent for
piety and good sense, used to say to his children: "Please God and
please yourselves, and you shall never displease me."